Free software and the political philosophy of the cyborg world

Authors:
S. Chopra;S. Dexter
Affiliations:
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY;Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY
Venue:
ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society - Selected papers from CEPE 2007: The Seventh International Conference on Computer Ethics -- philosophical enquiry
Year:
2007

Citing 3
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Abstract

Our freedoms in cyberspace are those granted by code and the protocols it implements. When man and machine interact, co-exist, and intermingle, cyberspace comes to interpenetrate the real world fully. In this cyborg world, software retains its regulatory role, becoming a language of interaction with our extended cyborg selves. The mediation of our extended selves by closed software threatens individual autonomy. We define a notion of freedom for software that does justice to our conception of it as language, sketching the outlines of a social and political philosophy for a cyborg world. In a cyberspace underwritten by free software, political structures become contingent and flexible: the polity can choose to change the extent and character of its participation. The rejection of opaque power is an old anarchist ideal: free software, by making power transparent, carries the potential to place substantive restrictions on the regulatory power of cyborg government.